Kindness makes me cry. When I see someone helping someone else out or hear a news story about the kindness of people who take in people caught in an emergency or the thousand other kindnesses that take place in any given day, I'm touched in a way that's different than anything else. It brings tears to my eyes.
I've asked myself why. I think I'm responding to our deep need to touch one another. To give, rather than receive. Kindness is the deepest expression of our desire for community; nothing draws two people together in the way that kindness does. I think there must be a very ancient need in us to help someone who needs it. You can call it our altruism gene but I prefer kindness.
Some kindnesses are anonymous. To give and not need acknowledgement, or want it, or to be in trouble yourself and still be kind to another, is selflessness of a very high order. In Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning," he gives an account of his time in a concentration camp. At one point, he writes that only those prisoners could keep alive who had lost all scruples in the fight for existence. They were prepared to steal, betray friends, use force, even be brutal to save themselves. "We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not come back."
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